California’s Hispanic population will rank No. 1 in 2014

In this June 27, 2013 photo, Omar Martinez poses at his family-owned Miravalle Foods spices and herbs business in El Monte, Calif. Martinez, 41, is the American-born son of immigrants from the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Latinos have become Californiaís largest racial or ethnic group and are projected to become a majority by 2020, largely the result of a surge of immigrants from Mexico and Central American immigrants in the 1980s that included Martinez and millions more.
AP Photo — Damian Dovarganes

In this July 16, 2013 photo, Hilario Santiago Vasquez, right, looks on as his wife Josefina Hernandez Santiago holds the couple’s 5-month-old daughter Esmeralda in Madera, Calif. A farmworker, Santiago Vasquez once followed the crops and slept under a bridge for lack of housing, but has since found permanent work and an apartment in California, a state where Hispanics are more settled than anywhere else.
AP Photo — Gosia Wozniacka

California Hispanics - Settling Down

Next year Hispanics will surpass whites as the largest racial or ethnic group in California.

Over the next two weekends, The Associated Press explores California’s Hispanics, their influences on the state and the hurdles they still face.

TODAY: Hilario Santiago Vasquez is one of millions who helped Hispanics become California’s largest racial or ethnic group.

MONDAY: When it comes to how California is educating students of color, many say the state serves as a model of what not to do.

SUNDAY, DEC. 29: In the brick plaza, strolling musicians wearing glitzy cowboy outfits blast a mariachi song, while Spanish-speaking shoppers bustle between farm stands. Welcome to an increasingly typical town in California where Hispanics become the largest ethnic or racial group next year.

MONDAY, DEC. 30: Latinos have held some of California’s highest-profile elected offices, including lieutenant governor, mayor of Los Angeles and key leadership posts in the state Legislature. Yet a smattering of city councils, school districts and local agencies have eluded their grasp in places like Escondido.

MADERA — Hilario Santiago Vasquez came to California during a surge of 1980s immigration to follow the crops from the Central Valley to Oregon to Florida. Along the way, he picked grapes, blueberries and oranges.

“I slept under the bridge, covering myself with a newspaper, because there was no housing to rent for farmworkers,” he said.

Santiago Vasquez, one of millions who helped Hispanics become California’s largest racial or ethnic group, no longer chases harvests.

Like many other Mexican farmworkers, he found permanent work. He now lives in Madera, a town north of Fresno where 80 percent of the 61,000 residents are Latino and the downtown is packed with Mexican restaurants and stores that sell cowboy boots and tortillas.

ROOTS RUN DEEP

California witnessed an immigration boom from Mexico and Central America during the 1980s, helping to make Hispanics the state’s largest racial or ethnic group next year. While the Latino boom moved to other states in recent years, particularly in the Midwest and South, California’s population has become more settled. The following figures illustrate the trend.

• Seventy percent of California immigrants have lived in the U.S. before 2000, higher than any state in the country, according to 2012 census data. The majority are Latinos, according to Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, which analyzed the data.

• Hispanic population growth was slower in California than almost every state in the 2010 census, up 27.8 percent from 2000, compared with 43 percent nationwide. The only ones lower were New York (19.2 percent), District of Columbia (21.8 percent) and New Mexico (24.6 percent).

• The number of foreign-born arrivals in the city of Los Angeles was 43.2 percent lower in 2009 than it was in 1990, while foreign-born arrivals nationwide went the other direction, soaring 47.8 percent, according to USC researchers. Foreign-born as a percentage of the entire population barely changed from 1990 to 2009 in Los Angeles at just below 40 percent, while jumping to 12.5 percent from 7.9 percent nationwide.

• California has the largest number of people living illegally than any other state and is second only to Nevada in percentage terms. But, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of people living illegally in the state grew 11 percent from 2000 to 2010, well below a national increase of 34 percent.

• Los Angeles is the only major metropolitan area in the nation to witness a decline in the number of Hispanic children in the 2010 census, bucking a trend in all 50 states, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. The findings suggest that young Hispanic families and new arrivals are settling elsewhere.

His story illustrates a reality for California Hispanics: With the immigrant boom ending long ago, they are older and more settled than elsewhere. As a result, they have relatively high rates of home ownership, rising incomes and are better educated.

“We’re running 15 to 20 years ahead of the nation,” said Dowell Myers, a demography and urban planning professor at USC. “California has a large population of second-generation children who are now coming of age. The rest of the country doesn’t have that.”

Racial, ethnic composition of California

California’s racial and ethnic composition has evolved significantly since 1970. The following list shows how the percentage of the white population has shrunken while the Hispanic population has soared. All figures are percentages.

1970

White: 74.7

Hispanic: 15.5

Black: 6.8

Asian and Pacific Islander: --

1980

White: 67

Hispanic: 19.2

Black: 7.5

Asian and Pacific Islander: 5.2

1990

White: 57.2

Hispanic: 25.8

Black: 7

Asian and Pacific Islander: 9.1

2000

White: 46.7

Hispanic: 32.4

Black: 6.9

Asian and Pacific Islander: 12.1

2010

White: 40.1

Hispanic: 37.6

Black: 6.3

Asian and Pacific Islander: 14.4

2020 (projected)

White: 36.6

Hispanic: 40.8

Black: 5.6

Asian: 13.4

Source: California Department of Finance, based on U.S. Census Bureau data. The 1970 Census used Spanish surnames to determine Hispanic ethnicity; Asian and Pacific Islanders were not counted separately.

As California joins New Mexico next year as the only other state where Latinos make up the largest racial or ethnic group, other regions of the country are seeing stronger growth. New Latino arrivals are reshaping the Midwest and South, just as they did California a generation ago.

Santiago Vasquez, 47, fled after Mexico’s economy collapsed in 1982, at the same time Central Americans abandoned their homes as civil wars spread. He came to California in 1985 to work in the fields, following other migrants who were pushed north by poverty from villages in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

New arrivals poured into Los Angeles’ Koreatown, San Francisco’s Mission District and other urban enclaves, telling friends and family back home that jobs were waiting.

Rosa Lopez, 45, was one of them. She knew she wasn’t cut out for hard labor on her family’s Oaxacan ranch when she followed her cousin to San Diego 25 years ago. “Once I arrived here, I never thought about going back,” said Lopez, who eventually got a green card through her husband and became an American citizen.

As defense jobs dwindled in the aftermath of the Cold War, however, and the 1990s recession hit harder than other states, new arrivals from Mexico and Central America increasingly shunned California for states where job prospects were better and housing was cheaper.

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The number of people living in the country illegally tripled in Iowa from 2000 to 2010, nearly doubled in Ohio and surged 55 percent in North Carolina, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

“Once there’s an immigrant beachhead, other people move in ... In the South, first people broke the ice and others followed,” said Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.

In California, the previous generation of Hispanic immigrants transformed communities, such as Madera. Latino farmworkers settled near downtown, as whites moved to suburban subdivisions.

Santiago Vasquez brought his wife and three daughters from Mexico in 2002, and rented an apartment in the downtown. He ended his annual tradition of picking blueberries in Oregon a few summers later and found a year-round job with a company that grows almonds and pistachios.

A lack of temporary housing in other states discouraged farmworkers like Santiago from chasing the harvests, said Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis Some farmworkers settled in states such as Oregon and Washington, meaning fewer migrants were needed.

Santiago Vasquez earns about $11,000 a year, a reminder that Latinos lag other groups on the income ladder. Latinos had a median household income of $44,401 in 2011 — well below the statewide median of $58,328. Many work in low-skilled jobs.

Lopez makes about $32,000 a year cleaning offices seven days a week in San Diego. Despite her financial struggles, she recently bought a three-bedroom condominium. Sixty percent of California Latinos who have been in the U.S. at least 30 years are homeowners, six points above the state average, according to USC’s Myers.

“I wasn’t thinking of buying, but then I can’t be throwing my money into the trash,” she said.

Lopez didn’t finish high school in Mexico. Her children attend San Diego State and community college. California’s high school dropout rate among Hispanics is 16.2 percent in 2012 — compared with 13.2 percent overall — but the education gap is closing.

Marjorie Garcia, 36, worked three jobs to put herself through Cal State Northridge and now practices entertainment law in Los Angeles. It is a far cry from her childhood in a rough neighborhood in the Los Angeles community of Panorama City, where her family rented a two-bedroom apartment.

Her father came to California from Mexico when he was 18 and her mother came from Guatemala when she was 15, and both stayed illegally. He worked as a Thai restaurant busboy and wait staff supervisor at the Los Angeles Country Club. She cleaned houses.

“I feel like I did what I was supposed to do,” said Garcia, whose parents had only an elementary school education. “You’re supposed to go to school and get educated.”

Omar Martinez, the son of Mexican immigrants who grew up bilingual and bicultural in suburban Los Angeles, is an American success story. As a teenager, he listened more to Milli Vanilli than the Mexican music of his parents but came to appreciate his family’s culture as he grew older.

Martinez still has family in Zacatecas state, and heads the Federation for Zacatecans in Southern California — a group that raises money for public works projects in the Mexican state. The organization was started by migrants to California years ago, and Martinez is the first American-born president of the group.

Now 42, he employs 50 people at Miravalle Foods in El Monte, which posted more than $7 million in revenues last year selling tamarind, curry, chiles and other Mexican cooking staples to supermarkets in California, Colorado and Utah. He is also raising four children to speak English and Spanish — and two of them are also learning Chinese.

“The other day they congratulated (my daughter) because she knows the numbers 1 to 100 in Chinese,” he said in his office overlooking a pungent warehouse as workers slapped stickers on boxes. “We think that’s going to be the future, right?”